Communicating with youth about the dangers of noise exposure is a crucial issue. Expressing noise exposure in decibels (dB) or the noise dose in percentage (%) is too often of little value given the complexity of one and the abstraction of the other.

In the quest for a meaningful message to pass to the youth, we envisioned a new metric, the ”Age of Your Ears” (AYE), that is an indication of the predicted extra aging caused by the excessive noise dose each user is exposed to.

Using only the age, the sex (assigned at birth) and the sound exposure, a personalized AYE value can be computed for each subject,, to represent the possible acceleration of aging caused by excessive music listening

The proposed “Age of Your Ears (AYE)” metric is computed using the ISO 1999 multiregression model and predicts for a given age and a given sound exposure the resulting accelerated aging of the person’s hearing.

Based on normative data on aging and hearing loss data from

• Hearing loss from aging only
• Noise induced permanent threshold shift, depending on current age, years and levels of exposure)

The AYE calculations only apply to an adult population (≥18-year-old) and rely on the gender assigned at birth.

More information on the computation of AYE: Inciting our children to turn their music down: the AYE proposal and implementation. Jérémie Voix, Romain Dumoulin, Julia Levesque, & Guilhem Viallet. (2018)